Gerrys Big Show in Pieces

Earlier posts in this blog have documented some history and legacy of The Adventures of Gerry Gee, a unique children’s adventure series made at GTV9 circa 1959–1960 and originally shown on The Happy/Tarax Show.

The Fate of Gerry’s Big Show

Gerry’s Big Show was one of the stories in the series. It is in four parts.

The previous post “A Cross-Reference of Known Remaining Episodes of The Adventures of Gerry Gee” documents the known locations of three of these episodes:

• Episodes 1 and 4 are listed as having been sent by GTV9 to the NFSA circa 2010.

• Episode 2 was loaned to the author by a private collector for scanning in 2019. See the earlier post in this blog, “Another Episode of The Adventures of Gerry Gee Turns up in Private Hands”, for details.

• Denzil Howson’s collection also included a segment, probably from episode 3, in which Penny Loveday sings “Don’t Fence Me In” to her captors.

It is these latter two pieces which have been scanned and are presented here.

The Storyline

Gerry has decided to put on a show to raise funds for the local hospital. He teams up with his friend, singer Penny Loveday. Mr Williams offers Gerry and Penny the use of his disused warehouse downtown to build a theatre. He warns the youngsters not to open the door to the cellar because it is flooded. One evening a strange noise interrupts Penny’s rehearsal and she goes down to the cellar to investigate…

As to how the story is resolved, without the remaining episodes, that will have to be left to our imaginations for now.

Episode 2

This episode is complete apart from lost frames here and there caused by film breakage and re-splicing.

It is a good example of how two “versions” of Gerry Gee were seamlessly melded together throughout this series. For closeups or when Gerry is facing the camera and talking, we see Ron Blaskett’s ventriloquist dummy. For wider shots when Gerry is moving and walking, we see John Field wearing the Gerry Gee latex mask.

The illusion worked remarkably well and we find ourselves hardly noticing these transitions.

Another thing to note in this episode is the musical backing when Penny is “playing the piano” and singing in the warehouse. Initially we hear what is probably Margot Sheridan’s piano, but it is soon joined by Laurie Wilson’s Hammond organ and (probably) Billy Hunter’s drums. GTV9 was staffed by many talented people — musicians, performers, writers and technicians — and it was possible to call on almost any of these talents to contribute to productions such as The Adventures of Gerry Gee. Studio 4, GTV9’s dedicated music studio, may have been where this musical track was pre-recorded.

Segment from Episode 3

In this segment, Penny is captive of two villains — played by Frank Rich and Earl Francis. Frank starts playing the harmonica and Penny sings “Don’t Fence Me In”. Once again, we hear a much richer musical backing — piano, Hammond organ, and percussion. But who was playing the harmonica? Probably Horrie Dargie, who was on the staff at GTV9 during its early years. (According to Derham Groves, Horrie Dargie moved to HSV7 around the time Norman Spencer left GTV9 in 1960.)

Call to NFSA to make their episodes available

The decision by GTV9 circa 2010 when they moved out of Bendigo Street to transfer the remaining reels of The Adventures of Gerry Gee (and other old kines remaining in the basement vault) to the National Film and Sound Archive, rather than discarding them, hopefully has ensured that these historical gems will be preserved for future generations.

For now they are inaccessible pending action by the NFSA to inspect, catalog and schedule these films for scanning and making publicly available.

Technical Details

The quality of these original 16mm release prints is not great. Both would have suffered damage caused by repeated playing and rewinding. The prints are scratched. There is also considerable dust which probably dates from the original production workflow. While the quality may appear poor by modern standards of digital video, this kind of 16mm film quality was par for the course in the days of black and white television.

The soundtracks are particularly poor with very noticeable noise levels. Perhaps they were always like that or perhaps deterioration of the prints may have added to the noise levels. The frequency response of 16mm variable area optical prints was never particularly good. Sometimes this can be improved with equalisation (boosting the high frequencies), however with these particular prints boosting the high frequencies very quickly just increases the intrusion of noise.

Where possible modern digital noise reduction filters have been used to minimise noise and improve the sound quality, but much remains to be desired.

More details on the restoration work will be published in a separate post on the Film Restoration Diary blog.